


not like a tree (where the roots have to end)

by stardreamertwo



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: Blood and Gore, Body Horror, Field Surgery, Gen, Hurt Caduceus Clay, Major Character Injury, Shippy if you Squint, Surgery, Whump, no one has a good time
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-23
Updated: 2020-08-23
Packaged: 2021-03-07 02:00:35
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,252
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26059138
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/stardreamertwo/pseuds/stardreamertwo
Summary: The Savalirwood is in Caduceus. The Mighty Nein get it out.(It does not go easy.)
Relationships: Caduceus Clay & Fjord, Caduceus Clay & The Mighty Nein
Comments: 21
Kudos: 116





	not like a tree (where the roots have to end)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [catalists (Chrome)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Chrome/gifts).



When Fjord wakes up, Caduceus is shaking him.

He's sitting up before he’s even awake, scrambling to gather his senses. On instinct his arms come up around Caduceus, who all but falls into him, and- Caduceus has always been thin but the strange lumps Fjord can feel under the thin silk of his shirt are _wrong_. They were not there before and Fjord is certain they should not be there now.

Caduceus rasps his name and his voice sounds strangled, his eyes wide in the darkness and a slowly spreading patch of black on the right side of his shirt. Fjord’s eyes flick over the clearing but there’s only the Savalirwood there, run through with blight but nothing attacking.

“Get it out,” Caduceus begs, and Fjord does not know what is going on.

“Jester!” Fjord calls, because she is the healer and something is very wrong with Caduceus. Something has been wrong with Caduceus for a while now but not like this, not shaking and trembling and so thick with malaise that even Fjord, who is still so new to sensing anything, can feel it in him. His shout wakes her and everyone else, too, because Caleb’s lights pop into existence beside him and the stain on Caduceus’s shirt shines slick red.

“Lay him down,” Jester says. “We need to take off your shirt, okay?”

Caduceus is barely coherent enough to respond, but he gives what might be a nod, and then Veth is next to him, dagger already out. She cuts through the fabric and pulls it back, exposing Caduceus’s chest to the light. Up by his shoulder, an inch or so from his collarbone where the blood had been, is a single point, protruding from his skin; Jester reaches for it and Cad goes stiff, but he lets her touch it, only flinching when she brushes against his skin.

She pulls back and stares, confused, at the blood on her fingers.

“What is it?” Fjord asks.

“It felt like wood.”

Fjord looks back at Caduceus, his chest rising and falling in short, choppy fits. The lumps are clearer now, starker, breaking the line of his ribs, curling around his throat.

In the light, they look like vines.

“He said get it out,” Fjord whispers. “He told me to get it out.”

Veth swallows. “So we cut this thing out of him?”

Jester nods, once, and Veth reaches up- by his shoulder again, and Fjord thinks _it will not be that easy, this is not some contained thing_ , but he ignores it. Maybe they’ll get lucky, for once. He lets Yasha take his place, moving to hold Caduceus’s head while Veth cuts through.

And then Caduceus gasps, the sound of a dying man without enough air to scream. Veth swears loudly, and when Fjord looks over her knife is bloody and there’s another point- shoots, they’re shoots, Caduceus showed them to him in a garden once- pushing through Caduceus’s skin.

“What happened?” he snaps.

“I don’t know!” Veth snaps back. “I tried, and-“ She stops, swallows. “His skin started moving. Those things- they _grew_.”

Fjord looks closer and he can see it, now, where the vines have grown, carving trails under Caduceus’s flesh, right up to the bloody puncture wound.

For a moment, no one speaks.

Caduceus moans and turns his face into Fjord’s palm. His breaths are fast and shallow against Fjord’s skin and Fjord thinks of vines crawling up his throat, of the way he’d said Fjord’s name. Caduceus is suffocating. If they can’t remove this, he will choke to death. But if it responds to blades, if they can’t cut this out without these things spreading, the vines will tear Caduceus to pieces before they can even start. Neither option will save him, and for all that Fjord refuses to lose him tonight, he can’t see another way.

 _Wildmother, help us_ , he thinks, and the wind whistles cold against his hands. At first he thinks, irrationally, that it’s rejection, and then he realizes.

“Veth, switch with me,” he says, and Veth doesn’t even ask why. She shoves the dagger in its sheath and scrambles to do something else with her hands, as he steps back and moves around Caleb.

“What are you doing?” he asks.

“We need a holy weapon,” Fjord tells him, and summons the sword.

There’s a flurry of snowfall around his hand and then he’s holding the Star Razor. Fjord whispers the command and the runes start to glow, brighter than anything else in the clearing, bathing them all in blue-white light. It’s harder to breathe, all of a sudden. He pretends it’s not.

“Tell me how to do this.”

“. . . okay. Okay.” Jester’s voice trembles, but her hands are steady as she runs them over Caduceus’s skin, mapping out the bones, the growth. “It’s- it’s all through him, so you need to make a line down the chest, here. Beau and Caleb-“

She looks at them and falters.

“We do what, Jess?” Beau prompts her, and she takes a single, shaky breath.

“You’ll need to pull the cut open, so Fjord can get at the vines. Yasha, Veth and I will- we’ll hold him down.”

They shift to get a better grip, and then Yasha looks at him. “Whenever you’re ready.”

He’s moving the sword into place when he feels a hand on his arm, and Jester whispers, “Traveler, guide him.”

Silently, Fjord sends his own prayer to the Wildmother: that whatever happens here, she will keep Caduceus safe. That she will protect Caduceus- from the things trying to kill him or from his shaking hands, he doesn’t know.

Then he nods.

The longsword is not made for thin, delicate cuts. It is a weapon first and a tool second, and for the first time since Fjord got it, it feels awkward and unwieldy in his hands. How easy it would be, to cut too shallow- how easy it would be, to cut too deep.

He presses the edge of the blade to Caduceus’s skin, and begins to draw it across. Blood wells up as soon as he moves away, following the blade in a line he can only hope is straight. At the very least, Caduceus must understand what’s going on, or part of it, because he stays mostly still even as Fjord slices through him.

Then he pulls away. Beau and Caleb reach forward, slip their palms under the edges of the open wound, and this time Caduceus finds the air to _scream_.

He thrashes, breaking Veth’s grip on him, and Fjord throws his weight against him but it’s not enough. Blood spills, warm and red, over Caduceus’s fur- Fjord’s hands are slick with it and they’re hurting him, Fjord knows, but if they can’t hold him down-

And then the screaming cuts off, and Caduceus goes perfectly, completely still.

“You have a minute,” says Jester, her hands shimmering with pink magic, her voice thick with tears. Beau and Caleb only nod, pulling back the skin and fat and muscle. He doesn’t know how they aren’t sick.

He doesn’t know how he isn’t sick. They’ve seen brutal injuries before, but Fjord looks down and for a moment all he can process is red, a thick trembling mass of it in the gaping hole they’ve torn in Caduceus’s chest. On instinct, he recoils, and he has to force himself to keep looking until he can distinguish the bone from the muscle, and then the vines from the bone. Tendrils, dark and thick, curl around the ribs. They spread across the muscle like roots searching for fertile soil, piercing through the flesh and climbing into the throat- Fjord can’t see past where they disappear behind the skin, and he doesn’t want to look.

“Fjord,” whispers Veth. “Your sword.”

It’s not in his hand anymore. He doesn’t know when he dropped it.

Fjord reaches out and speaks the command. The vines look like they’re casting shadows in the light, as he adjusts the blade to try and align with the rib, where the stalk is thickest. It’s easy at first, weirdly so, and then he remembers that the sword can slip and that maybe it has, maybe he’s cut through Caduceus’s flesh and straight into his lungs, and the sword disappears in his hand.

“What-“

“It’s fine,” he says, quickly. “We’re fine.”

Looking down, he can see where the wood has split, where the sword’s cut through. The muscle beneath the rib, as far as he can tell, is whole. It should be comforting, that at least cutting through will not be hard. It’s not.

“I cut it.” His voice is distant. His breath feels shallow, inadequate. “We’re going to have to pull it out.”

“The spell’s going to end,” Jester warns them, and Yasha and Veth readjust their hold. Beau and Caleb throw their weight against Caduceus, and Fjord takes a breath.

“On three,” he says, curling his fingers around wet wood, and he hopes Caduceus can’t hear him as he counts, three, two, one-

He pulls.

It resists, clinging to the flesh as Caduceus fights underneath him, shaking as Fjord struggles to get a grip on the stem. There’s no leverage, nothing he can push back against that’s not wet flesh and raw nerves, and the vine is slippery with blood, smearing warm on his skin, his palms. Fjord holds on tighter and keeps pulling until suddenly, it gives, and he stumbles back from the force of it.

He stops, stares at the thing in his hand. It’s dripping.

Fjord drops it on the ground beside him before the bile rises too high in his throat.

When he looks back at the mess he’s making of Caduceus’s chest, the muscle is bleeding freely, covering the vines in a fresh coat of red. Veth whispers small nothings over Caduceus’s harsh, gasping breaths, and Fjord watches, nauseous, as the bone shifts in time with the sound.

 _The next one will be harder,_ he thinks, and reaches for it anyway. They have no other choice.

His hands slip off the second vine. They brush against the edges of the wound, shifting Beau’s hands, and Caduceus convulses, once, before he goes still. At first Fjord thinks it’s Jester again, and then he hears her panicked voice call for them to stop.

He freezes, pulling back. When he looks up, Caduceus’s eyes have fallen closed, and Jester is whispering frantically. He’s still breathing- Fjord can see the movement- and he thinks Caduceus has gone unconscious. For a moment, he thinks it’s a mercy.

And then Caduceus’s eyes open again, and he hears Jester say, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, but you have to stay awake- you can’t- we _can’t_ kill you because of this but you _have_ to stay awake, I’m sorry-”

 _Gods, no_ , Fjord thinks, as the understanding sets in. If Caduceus goes unconscious, they risk killing him in this misguided attempt to save his life. So they’re going to keep him conscious- they have to- and every time he blacks out, they’ll pull him back to this, to pain.

It’s torture. There’s no other word for it. It’s torture, and if they do not do it, he will die.

Caduceus’s eyes are wide with pain, wet with tears, and Fjord can’t look at him for long. He jerks his head back down. Jester’s apologies have turned into whispers and he echoes them silently, not trusting his voice to speak. It means nothing, not in the fact of what he’s about to do to Caduceus.

Then he reaches his hands back into the wet, red space of Caduceus’s chest, wraps them around the root, and keeps pulling until it comes free.

Someone has given Caduceus something to bite down on, he thinks. It muffles the screams, the sharp choking gasps, and Fjord is selfishly, horribly grateful for it. He doesn’t think he’d be able to do this, otherwise. He doesn’t know how he could. He doesn’t know how he’s doing it now, except that he has to and the longer it goes on, the more he seems to pull away from his body- like it’s someone else holding the vines, someone else dropping them on the forest floor, someone else preparing to hurt _their_ Caduceus all over again.

Fjord resummons the sword. The air tastes like copper.

Jester has to recast her healing spell when Fjord pulls out the section that has gone through Caduceus’s skin. There’s an awful tearing sound and he doesn’t look at it, forces himself not to, but he hears her whisper and watches as a few of the holes he’s made begin to close. There’s still so much blood in the chest cavity, though, and Fjord thinks of everything he’s heard about people who bled out from the inside and can only hope that Jester’s magic will fix it, somehow. Can only hope they haven’t killed him anyway.

He leaves the ones that creep up into Caduceus’s throat for last, because he’s terrified if he touches them wrong he’ll wreck Caduceus’s voice forever. Every time he bumps them there’s a cracking, strangled sound, and he doesn’t know if Caduceus is making it or if the vines are.

“Jester,” he says, and she nods.

“Stay still,” she whispers, and it sounds like it hurts her to say it but she lets the magic bleed through the words anyway.

The stems connected to it are already cut away, and Fjord reaches carefully up to where the ends creep into the chest cavity. He gets as good a grip as he can on them, and then, slowly, he starts to pull.

Fjord watches the raised shapes on Caduceus’s throat disappear as he draws the vines out, bit by bit. He gets one free and refuses to let himself look up again. One more.

He pulls it out and nearly throws it aside, wanting it out of his hands, wanting this to be _over_.

“Is it done?” Jester says, rushed.

“I don’t see any more,” Beau says, cautiously, after a moment.

Fjord thinks she’s right- he can’t see any of it in between Caduceus’s ribs- but if she’s wrong, if they’ve missed something, it’ll grow back, and then they’ll be here again. Fjord barely managed to do this once, and he knows for the rest of his life he’ll see vines along with tentacles in his nightmares, digging into flesh. He doesn’t know if he can do it twice.

 _Please_ , he thinks. _Wildmother, tell me if it’s gone. Please don’t let this all have been for nothing._

A breeze brushes Caduceus’s cheek, shifting a lock of his hair. Then it blows around Fjord’s shoulders, warm and affirming, and the relief is so strong it nearly shatters him.

“It’s done,” he says, and then Beau and Caleb are slowly, slowly letting the flesh return to its original position. They pull their hands away and the second they’re done, Jester lights up.

“Traveler, _fix him_ ,” she says, half a prayer and half a demand, and Fjord pushes himself back, away from Caduceus. He trusts Jester’s magic to heal what they’ve done- he’s seen her work miracles before. Caduceus is safe now. He will be okay.

Fjord knows this, and still he doesn’t move. Some terrible, irrational fear keeps his eyes on the ground, but he can’t seem to focus on anything else but his hands, barely recognizable as his own. Even in the dim light, they look like they’re covered in paint, but Jester’s paint doesn’t dry nearly as dark, doesn’t feel nearly as terrible on his skin.

He only realizes his breathing’s gone irregular when there’s movement in front of him. He manages to pull his gaze up to see Yasha, a waterskin in one hand.

“Wash,” she says, pulling his arms towards her, and Fjord does.

The blood has dried in layers. Some of it flakes off under the water, but most of it he has to scrape off with his nails. But it’s something to do, so he doesn’t stop until he can see green again, until all that’s left are red lines in the cracks of his knuckles and under his nails.

“We’ll clean up again when we’re out of the woods.” Her voice is gentle, and she’s speaking for his benefit- her hands are, mostly, clean. It should be comforting; it is, but the dread in the back of his mind doesn’t settle.

“Caduceus,” he says, quietly. Yasha understands, at least- she nods, and gives him the waterskin. Caleb is straightening too, as Veth lets go of where she’s been cleaning his hands, and Jester and Beau are doing the same. Caduceus’s chest is healed, now, as best it can be, but it’s coated in still-drying blood.

For a moment, no one moves. Then Caleb rises and leaves.

When he comes back, he is holding rags. They look almost like the ones he used to wear, but they’re too clean for that; it doesn’t really matter where they came from, anyway, and Fjord takes one. He soaks it in water and then gently, methodically, begins to clean.

They can’t get all of it off. Some of it has dried and stuck to the fur, and would take too much force to remove- wounds tend to be sore, even after they’re healed, and no one wants to hurt Caduceus again. It gives him a reason, at least, to avoid the messy scar he knows must be under the blood, in the center of Caduceus’s chest, that no healing will erase.

He did that. He carved Caduceus open and pulled him apart, and it was to save him but that excuse seems feeble now. Fjord swallows, and keeps going.

It’s Caleb that gets up first, when they’ve washed away all they can, to recast the dome. Veth checks the perimeter of their clearing, in case anything’s been drawn by the noise, while Yasha stands up and places herself between them and the forest.

“I’ll take first watch,” she says, quietly, and Beau is quick to join her. Jester waves a hand to refill the waterskins before she starts gathering the rags and cleaning them, bit by bit, and then it’s just Fjord.

He should move, probably. He should let Caduceus rest. He should move away from the person he cut open, and yet he doesn’t. He stays, watching the slow, steady rise and fall of Caduceus’s chest, as if he’s sleeping. Fjord hopes he’s sleeping, and then he looks up to see Caduceus’s face and finds his eyes flickering open.

His first instinct is to reach out and he bites it down. He’s not sure how much Caduceus knows about what’s going on right now, whether he thinks Fjord is going to hurt him again, so he settles for backing up and saying, “You’re okay. Everyone’s okay, and- you’re safe.”

Caduceus looks at him, afraid, and he’s just about to call to Jester when he sees Caduceus’s mouth move. His voice is too shot to make any sound, but it almost looks like he’s trying to say Fjord’s name.

His fingers twitch, shifting slightly towards Fjord, and for a moment Fjord can only stare. Then, slowly, he comes closer.

“I’m- I’m here, Caduceus.”

The fear in his eyes fades, ever so slightly. Fjord reaches for his hand, and Caduceus lets him take it.

He sits there, rubbing small, slow circles over Caduceus’s fur, with the night and the woods and a faint warm breeze around them, and he does not look away until Caduceus falls back asleep.

**Author's Note:**

> Blame this on Chrome. It is _entirely_ the fault of her and the prompt she put on her horror exchange letter, which would not let me sleep until I wrote it.
> 
> Credit to Chrome as well for the title, from "Scheherazade" by Richard Siken.


End file.
